Obama campaign fails to land early punches

The United States presidential election is a 15-round heavyweight title fight. So you don’t want to get carried away by the first few rounds.

Still, President
Barack Obama
has had an awful first few rounds in the 2012 presidential title fight. The plight of his Commerce Secretary John Bryson – facing a hit and run arrest in Los Angeles – is just the latest setback.

Mr Obama chose to ring the bell and come out swinging just under six weeks ago, when Rick Santorum had pulled out of the Republican primary race and
Mitt Romney
was set to claim the nomination.

Then, conventional wisdom was that Mr Romney was down for the count after a bitter primary battle forced him to take positions on – for example – immigration and taxation at odds with his moderate image.

Mr Obama took off the gloves in the swing states of Ohio and Virginia. Mr Romney was a patriotic American with a wonderful family but had drawn the wrong lessons from his experiences running Bain Capital and Massachusetts, he said.

“He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money, the rest of us will automatically make money as well," Mr Obama said

The fans cheered, but on that very day came the news of a sharp slowdown in the jobs market. In the six weeks since, not much has gone right for the President. Mr Romney shrugged off his primaries baggage,- such as the gap in support from women, and emerged as a competitive rival.

The economy continued to sag, Syria erupted in violence, testing the President’s cool command of foreign policy, and the euro zone debt crisis re-erupted, this time in Spain.

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The Obama campaign fluffed its lines. A cartoon campaign figure – “Julia" – showcasing government benefits at risk in a Romney presidency became in Republican hands evidence of Mr Obama’s cradle to grave welfare state vision.

But surely Mr Romney’s career as CEO of private equity firm Bain Capital had to be a winner for Mr Obama?

The campaign released a video ad, in which steelworkers laid off by a company owned by Bain said executives had acted like “vampires". But this misfired too. Mr Romney had left two years before the layoffs, which were just a few hundred among about 250,000 American steelworkers laid off in the 1980s and 1990s.

But
Bill Clinton
? Too much! Mr Obama should be campaigning on his record, his plans for a second term and how they compared to Mr Romney’s, Mr Clinton told CNN. Conspiracies swarmed. Was Mr Clinton nursing a grudge for the ruthless way Mr Obama dispatched
Hillary Clinton
in the 2008 Democratic primaries?

Or just speaking his mind? Either way, the damage was done, and more was to come. Consumer confidence had already fallen. March quarter growth was revised down to below 2 per cent. Job creation skidded to an anaemic 69,000 in May, and unemployment jumped up to 8.2 per cent.

Mr Clinton went off the reservation again, declaring the Bush tax cuts should be extended for all income groups beyond December 31, to allow time to negotiate a way out of the “fiscal cliff" looming on January 1. That flatly contradicted Mr Obama, who wanted to extend them only for sub-$US250,000 households. Mr Clinton had to walk it back.

Mr Romney out-raised Mr Obama for the first time in May, by $US17 million. Spain threatened to implode. Mr Obama’s calls to European leaders seemed to have little effect. Stockmarkets swooned. The Obama campaign’s bid to switch the attack from Bain to Mr Romney’s record in Massachusetts was drowned out.

On Friday, attempting to explain why Congress should fund jobs for cops, teachers and firemen, Mr Obama said “the private sector’s doing fine". It was an astonishing gaffe for an accomplished campaigner, and he had to do a Clinton and walk it back.

Too late. It didn’t just show how “out of touch" the President was, to use Mr Romney’s words. It also showed once again to Republican eyes and ears that Mr Obama sees the economy through the prism of government action, not its engines of wealth and job creation – private firms and entrepreneurs.

On the weekend, Mr Bryson’s double hit and run gaffe. The White House is attributing it to a ‘seizure’ suffered by Mr Bryson at an indeterminate time before the incident, but seems awfully short of detail.

It’s early days. But so far Mr Obama has swung a lot of air punches and thrown himself off balance, without causing Mr Romney too much discomfort. He needs to find his feet for the next round.